Debunking childless by choice as selfless

Even to call “Making a Green Choice” an “article” is overly generous, since, despite the demise of print media, the word still carries some implications of quality. However, just as someone can be called an actor simply for appearing in a film, this is an article only in the sense that it has been published. It reads much more like an angry, lonely rant beneath a Facebook post on the joys of being a stay-at-home mother—the same sort of thing blogger-troll Amy Glass managed to exploit with her recent tirade “I Look Down On Young Women With Husbands and Kids.”

For this reason, the appearance of “Making a Green Choice” in a print magazine – especially in Mother Earth News, which has always been about tradition – seems an accident of our shifting public forums. Hailing from the blogosphere, such articles as this might also be seen as a reminder of how reckless and impulsive online commentary can become. Its ideas have, so to speak, no gestation period, and often reinforce the idea that social media is making us into sociopaths.